Is the Voice you speak with today the same you grew up with?

When a child, I lived in some other cities in Brazil and know very well how children can be mean when you express yourself in a differnt way. So much so that many of us struggle to adapt. Not my case, however. In fact I felt the urge to be different, never to merge. But that’s not the point here. The point is an essay based on a lecture given in 2008: ‘Speaking in Tongues’, by Zadie Smith. It’s worth your time, as I believe you can see from the following except:

“(…)  As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion, “many thousands of [British] men and women…have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.”

Few, though, will admit to it. Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-rising terminals you’re a sell-out; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style—even if you try something as innocent as parmigiano for “parmesan”—you’re a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you’ve gone from Cockney to “mockney,” and can expect a public tar and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular. (…)”